~ The daily blog written by ITL's Neil Stratton

BPS’ Pete Bommarito on the New 1.5 Rate

We wrap up our series talking to trainers about the proposed SRA change with Pete Bommarito of Bommarito Performance Systems. Pete’s two facilities, in Davie and North Miami, Fla., draw dozens of top NFL prospects each winter/spring but also dozens of top MLB and NBA players. You won’t find a better speed trainer in the business than Pete, and his facilities are growing and adding more veterans each offseason.

From here, I’ll let Pete and ITL’s Mark Skol take over.

“It’s hard for me to say (how the new SRA will affect things) because I’m not an agent. This is more of a question for an agent. But I don’t see it affecting much because you would still think that a lot of agents will continue to justify and charge the 3 percent.

“We’ve always been a company that has overspent overhead. That’s our business model. We could save money with our overhead, we just choose not to. We are a firm believer in residual business and we are upfront with agents about that. Our price is our price and our overhead is high. We spend a lot of money on things like medical, nutrition, football coaching and staffing. We spend a lot of money. Our overhead is very high. So we don’t really anticipate us making a huge profit margin on draft guys.

“Our model is our veterans program. Our veterans program is significant and we really build that through pre-draft training. We can’t see ourselves doing anything different even if our overhead stays where it is and our overall revenue goes down a bit because agents are paying us less. We are not going to change our model. Our model works and we get so much residual business among draft prep players coming back as veterans that I don’t ever want to interrupt with the service we provide. We probably have the biggest and fastest-growing veteran program in the country. I firmly believe it’s because we take care of them so well in the pre-draft training. It’s about making overall athletes quicker, relieving pain fast and regenerating quickly. I can’t see myself doing anything different.

“I don’t see it as a new rate. The agents can still charge three percent. It seems to me it’s the same. In past years, agents still had to charge 3 percent and justify why. I really don’t see it changing anything. They are still charging 3 percent and justifying why. A lot of agents I talk to are happy to justify why they are going to charge 3 percent and have no problem laying out their services and everything they do and why they deserve to get paid. It’s very similar to how I handle a veteran. We have a certain price structure for NFL veterans and we have no problem justifying it to them on why we charge what we charge and what services they are going to get.”